Rethinking communications: Automating tapeout review reporting

Tapeout of a chip is a collaboration between the design house and the foundry. Replacing manual error reporting with an automated reporting capability provides a number of benefits to both the report generator and the report recipient.

Following are some examples of typical
HTML reports generated for different purposes, showing the various types
of information that can be included in these reports.

Waivers

The
waiver report (Figure 4) enables the recipient to review proposed
waiver shapes with error markers. Multiple snapshots at different zoom
levels can be included to ensure a clear understanding of the affected
geometries. Identical shapes can be categorized under the same rule
check to save review time, and each snapshot can contain a pop-up tip to
explain the error details.

Electrical reliability verification

When
viewing electrical rule checking results (Figure 5), a histogram can be
calculated on a desired property (e.g., ERROR%) to help analyze the
error severity, while a colormap can display the current density map. If
no snapshot is specified, the reporting process automatically generates
an error table and sorts by the selected property, to further aid data
analysis.

Figure
5: HTML report on electrical rule checking results. Histograms and
colormaps assist the recipient in locating the error and understanding
its impact on the design.

Benefits

Summing it up,
replacing manual error reporting with an automated reporting capability
such as Calibre RVE’s HTML Reporting provides a number of benefits to
both the report generator and the report recipient:

Automated
report generation enables layout engineers to facilitate team
collaboration by providing a report that can be quickly screened to
identify the most severe design issues. These issues can be assigned to
the most experienced engineers for analysis, while remaining issues can
be debugged simultaneously by other team members. Not only do you reduce
the overall time required for debugging, but you can ensure the most
efficient and effective use of your engineering resources.

Automated
snapshots and standardized (yet customizable) text explanations replace
manually compiled documentation, enforcing data consistency and
accuracy while freeing up engineering resources for more valuable work
and reducing time to market.

By using a web server for report
access, not only are frequent and often time-consuming file transfers
between the foundry and design house no longer needed, but any number of
recipients can access the report at any time. In addition, tighter
security can be enforced through the web server architecture to ensure
that reports are only available to those with the appropriate access.

As
physical verification complexity grows, the need for automated
assistance is driving the delivery of capabilities such as Calibre RVE’s
HTML Reporting. By automating time-consuming and error-prone reporting
tasks, and implementing new delivery mechanisms, the HTML reporting
capability not only improves the accuracy and efficiency of the
debugging process, but it also returns valuable time to the process flow
that can be used to improve designs and deliver them to market more
quickly.

About the author

Yijun
Tong is a Technical Marketing Engineer with Mentor Graphics, focusing
on Interactive and Integration Technology for the Calibre product line
in the Design to Silicon division. Prior to joining Mentor Graphics,
Yijun worked for Intel Corporation. He received his B.Sc. in Electrical
Engineering from Fudan University in Shanghai, China, and a M.Sc. in
Information Systems Management from Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh, PA. For more information, email iit_tme@mentor.com

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